He designs and studies technologies that enable people to connect and collaborate—a field called social computing. He has created technologies used by millions of people: the Scratch website, an award-winning online community for children to learn programming; Calendar.help, Microsoft's first human computation product; Journeys & Notes, an urban exploration app shipped under the Microsoft Garage; Sana, a healthcare app designed to help nurses in Zambia in partnership with MIT; and SFX, a tool to help researchers find scientific publications.

Projects

🤖Calendar.help2016

🚀Journeys & Notes2014

Mobile app for logging and connecting with others taking the same trips. Explored the design of urban computing technologies for non-places.
In collaboration with Justin Cranshaw and Sarah Needham.
Learn more.

📡Eventful2014

System for on-demand news production, leveraging offline crowd workers. Explored the idea of journalism as a service. In collaboration with Elena Agapie and Todd Newman.
Learn more.

📰Newspad2013

System for collaborative story-telling. Exploring the use of social media for collective action. In collaboration with Nathan Matias.
Learn more.

🎭Picotale2013

Tool for easily creating and sharing image macros, also known as "memes." Explored the social construction of Internet aesthetics. In collaboration with Dan Marshal and colleagues at FUSE Labs.
Learn more.

🏠Whooly2013

Hyperlocal view of Twitter. In collaboration with Shelly Farnham and Yuheng.
Learn more.

🐈Scratch Online Community2007 - 2012

Led the design and study of the Scratch Online Community: a large web site where children aged 8 to 16
create and share their own animations and video games. The web site receives more than 10 million
page views per month, has more than 1 million registered members, and 3 million
user-submitted projects. Collaborative work with the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT. Learn more.

😷Sana Mobile2008

Mobile application to connect healthcare professionals with people in remote locations in the developing world. Created as part of the NextLab
initiative at MIT and piloted in Zambia. Collaborative work with Leo Celi. Learn more.

Monroy-Hernández,
A.,Kiciman, E., boyd, d., Counts, S. (2012).
Narcotweets: Social Media in Wartime. In Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM '12) Note: For a more in-depth article on this topic, please see the CSCW '13 publication above titled The New War Correspondents

Burke, W.,
Monroy-Hernández, A.,Kafai,
Y. (2011). Tagging in a Community of Media Creators: Practices that make programs popular in Scratch Online. In
Proceedings of the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (AERA
'11)

New Opportunities
in Amateur Interactive Content.Invited speaker.
Amateur Hour Conference. New York Law School. New York, NY,
2007

User-created
Content: What are the Impacts?Invited speaker.
Technology Foresight Forum on the Participative Web, Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Strategies and Policies for the Future.
Canada, 2007